Course Descriptions
ENGL 5000 Directed Reading
CREDIT HOURS: 3
FORMAT COMMENTS: Individual instruction
RESTRICTIONS: Students may only register for this class with the written permission of a Faculty member and the Graduate Coordinator.
ENGL 5006 Studies in Research-Creation
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This course aims to familiarize students with the recent debates and developments in and around the concept of Research-Creation by turning to theoretical articulations as well as the products of Research-Creation in literary (and adjacent) contexts.
FORMAT: Seminar
LECTURE HOURS PER WEEK: 2
ENGL 5118 Reading the Canterbury Tales (All of Them)
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This course will provide an opportunity to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales closely in its entirety, with a view to establishing over-arching connections, themes and concerns.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5119 Chaucer - Dream Visions and Tales other than Canterbury
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This course will cover Chaucer's non- Canterbury Tales writings, including Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, The Legend of Good Women, and The Book of the Duchess. We will consider Chaucer's sources and predecessors as well as imitations and expansions such as Henryson's Testament of Cresseid.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5121 Guy Gavriel Kay and his medieval inspiration
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This course will take an intertextual and trans-historical approach to the work of Canadian fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5135 England’s Late-Medieval Alliterative Poetry
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This seminar will survey such masterworks of the late-medieval period as Pearl, Sir Gawain and Piers Plowman, as well as diverse lyrics and short poems, major romance-narratives and cycle-plays. Analysis of the poems’ verbal resources, stylistic techniques and topical preoccupations will be conjoined to some questions of codicology and pertinent history. The course will build upon a basic undergraduate acquaintance with the Middle English language and canon, and will offer an introduction to manuscript studies.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5227 Re-Imagining the Plot in Selected Shakespearean Tragedies
CREDIT HOURS: 3
Starting with Ben Jonson’s Aristotelian account of plot -- “it behoves the action in a tragedy to be let grow, till the necessity ask a conclusion” -- this course explores the ways in which some of Shakespeare’s tragedies adhere to or depart from the principles of Aristotle’s Poetics.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5235 Milton's Paradise Lost
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This seminar is intended both for students who are familiar with the poem and for those who will be coming to it for the first time. We will read the poem closely, book by book, and examine the poem in its historical, intellectual, and literary contexts. At the same time, we will consider some exemplars of the major twentieth-century critical approaches to the poem.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5236 Poetry and Rhetoric in Early Modern Culture
CREDIT HOURS: 3
The central aim of this course will be to evaluate the achievement of English poetry during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. We will question primarily through a study of short poems, their relation to the influential rhetorical works, and their relation to each other.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5238 Othello and Its Afterlife
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This course focuses on a single play by Shakespeare as a key site where early modern notions of race, gender and class converge. It begins by interrogating the apparent stability of Shakespeare's text, which exists in alternative authoritative versions (Quarto and Folio) and is always mediated by the conditions of a playhouse in which white males play both women and blacks. We'll aim to unpack the complex, cultural constructions of gender and race with which this play is so deeply concerned by studying a range of contemporary discourses (primary source material on microfilm) as well as Shakespeare's own Titus Andronicus, which anticipates some of Othello's preoccupations.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5256 The Gawain-Poet
CREDIT HOURS: 3
The Cotton Nero A.x. manuscript contains the single extant version of four of the greatest poems in Middle English: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Patience and Cleanness. This course will study these four works by one anonymous author, known to scholars as the Gawain-poet or the Pearl-poet. Written in a more difficult dialect of Middle English than Chaucer or Malory, the poems are in alliterative long-line as well as occasional rhyme, and may provide the only evidence of a sophisticated 14th-century court located in the North-West Midlands area of England.
FORMAT: Seminar
LECTURE HOURS PER WEEK: 2
LAB HOURS PER WEEK: 0
TUTORIAL HOURS PER WEEK: 0
ENGL 5265 Writing Women/Women Writing in Early Modern England 1540-1640
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This half-credit course explores the context and range of women’s writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, we will examine a range of works by and about women, from witchcraft trials and medical treatises, to poems, plays, translations and polemical pamphlets in an attempt to determine the relation of early women writers to their culture. Writers to be studied in depth include Mary Wroth, Elizabeth Cary, and Aemilia Lanyer.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5266 Mothers and Maternity in Early Modern England 1580-1670
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This course explores motherhood in the culture and literature of early modern England.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5268 Gender and Politics in Jacobean London 1610-1624
CREDIT HOURS: 3
The seminar will seek to understand the intersection between politics and gender during the turbulent Jacobean years. Beginning with the writings of King James himself, we will read widely in the prose, poetry and drama of the period 1610-1624, from Shakespeare and Webster to Lady Mary Wroth.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5276 Spectatorship in Early Modern England
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This seminar will focus on the subject of spectatorship in England in the early modern period. We will use a number of works from the visual arts to begin an examination of how spectatorship was depicted in various texts from the early modern period.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5277 Cultures of Print in Early Modern Europe
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This course will aim to call the meanings of both “print” and “culture” into question in creative and productive ways. In our discussions, we’ll explore how the spread of printing technology and the circulation of printed materials in the early modern era extended across centuries and national boundaries, creating not a single homogenous “print culture” but an intersecting web of plural “cultures of print.” Together, we’ll consider: what are some of the major theories of how printed material was produced, circulated, and preserved over time? What is the relationship between print and diverse forms of cultural production, from literature and religion to science and medicine? And how did the emergence of print reshape the experiences of individual readers and book users, even as it also animated larger social and historical trends?
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5280 The Theory and Practice of Literary Pleasure
CREDIT HOURS: 3
An enquiry into some of the established ways of talking about literary pleasure, with a view to devising new and more persuasive ways of doing so.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5290 Writing Illness in Early Modern Literature
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This Seminar examines the contexts and texts of early modern illness, considering the work of writers medical, literary, and popular. As well as examining the role of language in shaping the realities of mind and body, the course considers how those realities were shaped by a rapidly changing medical epistemology.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5306 The Restoration Theatre
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This half-credit course traces various aspects of the English stage from 1660 to 1700. In addition to approximately a dozen plays, the course will consider the theatrical milieu of the period, including the audience, casts, and spectacular production techniques. Related political events and theoretical controversies will also be surveyed.
FORMAT: Seminar
ENGL 5316 Studies in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel
CREDIT HOURS: 3
This half-credit course is devoted to the study of a special subject in the early English novel (e.g. Desire, the image of America, the comic novel, the rise of the female novelist).
FORMAT: Seminar